Space-based systems are used for national defense purposes as well as for facilitating many aspects of modern life. Every year, a growing number of satellites are launched into orbit, making the space environment increasingly congested and contested. This trend challenges the ability to maintain space situational awareness through an up-to-date space object catalog, and to maintain space control through detection and mitigation of potential on-orbit threats. Due to the bright sky background, ground-based telescopes are generally unable to view high-altitude satellites during the day. Satellites can also be difficult to track by radars given their limited geographic distribution and range limitations. As a result, there are periods of unobserved time each day when potentially hazardous and/or nefarious space object can maneuver undetected from the ground, which could cause satellite operators to lose custody, as well as potentially putting nearby satellites at risk.
Ground-based optical telescopes are constrained to operating during the night due to the increase in photon shot noise and saturation potential from the daytime sky background. While some ground-based systems have addressed such issues, these systems are typically costly. Space-based systems may also be used during daytime hours, and do not experience detection issues due to photon shot noise, but are also costly and have limitations due to their observational patterns, their need to deal with solar avoidance, and their relatively long latency in sending tracking data to the ground. Ground-based passive radio frequency (RF) systems may detect Resident Space Objects (RSOs) during daytime hours, but these RSOs must be actively transmitting data to a satellite ground station. As a result, most RSOs are not observed during daytime hours, leaving nearby RSOs vulnerable to hazardous and/or nefarious activity.